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PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, September 1: It's back-to-school season in France, this time with tighter rules on mobile phones. In other news, local opposition to data centres across the US and Europe could be a spanner in the works of the AI revolution. Finally, in footballing news, Lionel Messi retires from the Argentinian national team, and some English men play football in a river.
In the French papers, one of President Emmanuel Macron's last marks on the national education system will be to extend an existing ban on mobile phones in schools to the oldest secondary school pupils. Le Figaro hails the development, even if Macron is yet to successfully pass what he hoped would be his landmark ban on social media for the under-15s. **Libération **also praises the effectiveness of the existing mobile phone bans for younger children, but reminds us that overall screen time still matters, and that schools are still the ones handling incidents of cyberbullying taking place outside of school hours.
Elsewhere, even though the global rollout of data centres is occasioning controversy pretty much everywhere, US President Donald Trump says their critics "want to end up backwards and poor". As the Financial Times explains, locals' concerns about water use, electricity consumption, as well as scepticism about long-term job creation have become impossible to ignore, even for Trump-endorsed Republican nominees in the upcoming midterms, with $150 billion worth of projects at a standstill across the US.
Meanwhile in the rural Austrian town of Kronstorf, Der Standard and **Politico **are covering local opposition to a data centre that could end up making up 7 percent of the country's electricity demand. With EU plans to triple the bloc's data centre capacity by 2035, local and environmental concerns over the resource-hungry mastodons could raise serious questions about the development of AI.
Finally, in football news, as Lionel Messi retires, La Nacion hails "the end of an era". Also in football, the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard were in Bourton-on-the-water over the weekend, for the 100-year-old tradition of football-in-the-water, where the local youth and veterans teams face off, quite literally, in the river.
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